1. Yes, I am listening to a psychedelic folk setting of Catullus 63. Some days this is an awesome planet.
2. For those of you who missed my allohistorical vignette "The Mirror of Venus" in Sirenia Digest #30, it will be reprinted by The Harrow in November. Needless to say, that leaves the entire summer to wait through, so you might as well just sign up for the digest now.
3. The Fall (2006) is a film about storytelling: motives, consequences, inspirations, means; the semiotic truth that a story belongs as much to the listener inside whose head the words take shape as to the teller who places them there; all the places that imagination overlaps with the world. The year is sometime after silent film and before World War I; Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) is the youngest in a family of migrant workers, recuperating from a broken arm—she fell out of an orange tree—in a hospital outside of Los Angeles. A fearless and inquisitive child, she writes inventively spelled letters to the nurses, collects trinkets for the cigar box of treasures she carries everywhere, and explores any ward the doctors won't shoo her out of, which is how she meets the moody, bedridden Roy (Lee Pace; Ned the piemaker, if you ever watched the odd and lovely Pushing Daisies), who is, among other things, a storyteller. For Alexandria, he spins a saga of five strange heroes, each with his own vendetta against a wicked governor, and chief among them in love and revenge is the Black Bandit, whom Alexandria begins to visualize with Roy's own dark-browed face, shadowed with memories of her father. In return, he will ask her for a small thing, no more than a favor. Only the audience knows, because we have overheard enough of the conversations that do not interest Alexandria (except insofar as she can steal visitors' faces to add to the epic panoply inside her head: all the story we see is her creation, with details supplied from her surroundings), Roy's story that he does not tell her—he's a stuntman in an early Hollywood Western, paralyzed from the waist down after a reckless stunt with a train trestle and a river; his girlfriend in his absence is being comforted by the leading man. Alexandria knows many words in English, but morphine is not one of them, or suicide. It's a reverse Scheherezade: a story told not to keep its teller alive, but in service of his death. And into this bitter frame are inset literal jewels of scenes, as richly colored and strange in their pageantry as any child's dreaming. (This is a story in simple, geometric shapes and the bold colours of a child's box of crayons . . .) When Roy speaks to Alexandria of her namesake, Alexander the Great, the screen fills instantly with her figuration of the famed conqueror, in a stiff red centurion's crest and golden plates of mail, pacing Bucephalus between the cracked pillars of a Roman forum; he dismounts and walks into a Mondrian sandscape of lion-colored dunes as Roy explains that there's no horse in this story, only Alexander and his men, on foot, lost in a desert. A map etches itself under the skin of a man who emerged from the charred trunk of a tree, his ropes of hair smoking like its blackened roots; inside a dome of brilliant mosaic dangles a chandelier of hanged men. The wicked governor's palace lies at the heart of a city whose walls (et les villes s'éclabouss'raient de bleu) are stained a thousand different shades of blue. Probably The Fall will be compared most closely to the work of Terry Gilliam and Julie Taymor, but I came out thinking somehow of Tanith Lee—the same unreserved combinatorics of language and imagery that either you find beautiful for its own sake or laughably overstyled. Guess which one I found. Now go see it in theaters.
4. There needs to be a story called "The Lost Rivers of London."
That will be all.
2. For those of you who missed my allohistorical vignette "The Mirror of Venus" in Sirenia Digest #30, it will be reprinted by The Harrow in November. Needless to say, that leaves the entire summer to wait through, so you might as well just sign up for the digest now.
3. The Fall (2006) is a film about storytelling: motives, consequences, inspirations, means; the semiotic truth that a story belongs as much to the listener inside whose head the words take shape as to the teller who places them there; all the places that imagination overlaps with the world. The year is sometime after silent film and before World War I; Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) is the youngest in a family of migrant workers, recuperating from a broken arm—she fell out of an orange tree—in a hospital outside of Los Angeles. A fearless and inquisitive child, she writes inventively spelled letters to the nurses, collects trinkets for the cigar box of treasures she carries everywhere, and explores any ward the doctors won't shoo her out of, which is how she meets the moody, bedridden Roy (Lee Pace; Ned the piemaker, if you ever watched the odd and lovely Pushing Daisies), who is, among other things, a storyteller. For Alexandria, he spins a saga of five strange heroes, each with his own vendetta against a wicked governor, and chief among them in love and revenge is the Black Bandit, whom Alexandria begins to visualize with Roy's own dark-browed face, shadowed with memories of her father. In return, he will ask her for a small thing, no more than a favor. Only the audience knows, because we have overheard enough of the conversations that do not interest Alexandria (except insofar as she can steal visitors' faces to add to the epic panoply inside her head: all the story we see is her creation, with details supplied from her surroundings), Roy's story that he does not tell her—he's a stuntman in an early Hollywood Western, paralyzed from the waist down after a reckless stunt with a train trestle and a river; his girlfriend in his absence is being comforted by the leading man. Alexandria knows many words in English, but morphine is not one of them, or suicide. It's a reverse Scheherezade: a story told not to keep its teller alive, but in service of his death. And into this bitter frame are inset literal jewels of scenes, as richly colored and strange in their pageantry as any child's dreaming. (This is a story in simple, geometric shapes and the bold colours of a child's box of crayons . . .) When Roy speaks to Alexandria of her namesake, Alexander the Great, the screen fills instantly with her figuration of the famed conqueror, in a stiff red centurion's crest and golden plates of mail, pacing Bucephalus between the cracked pillars of a Roman forum; he dismounts and walks into a Mondrian sandscape of lion-colored dunes as Roy explains that there's no horse in this story, only Alexander and his men, on foot, lost in a desert. A map etches itself under the skin of a man who emerged from the charred trunk of a tree, his ropes of hair smoking like its blackened roots; inside a dome of brilliant mosaic dangles a chandelier of hanged men. The wicked governor's palace lies at the heart of a city whose walls (et les villes s'éclabouss'raient de bleu) are stained a thousand different shades of blue. Probably The Fall will be compared most closely to the work of Terry Gilliam and Julie Taymor, but I came out thinking somehow of Tanith Lee—the same unreserved combinatorics of language and imagery that either you find beautiful for its own sake or laughably overstyled. Guess which one I found. Now go see it in theaters.
4. There needs to be a story called "The Lost Rivers of London."
That will be all.
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